The Future of Digital is Mobile - Sort Of

In a new presentation from Business Insider, The Future of Digital, CEO Henry Blodgett and his Business Intelligence team provide a comprehensive overview of how the digital landscape has changed in recent years and what's coming in the years ahead of us.

ipad iphone

In a new presentation from Business Insider, The Future of Digital, CEO Henry Blodgett and his Business Intelligence team provide a comprehensive overview of how the digital landscape has changed in recent years and what's coming in the years ahead of us. While the future certainly focuses on mobile content publishing, consumption, and advertising, the future of digital isn't only mobile.First, let's take a look at the digital landscape described in the Business Insider report to get some perspective. For example, mobile usage and content consumption on mobile devices continues to increase, and as it goes up, all other media decreases. Print, radio, and television are all experiencing decreases in the amount of time consumers spend with them, while mobile is on the rise.The content that people consume through mobile is diverse and continues to grow, too. Books, movies, television shows, magazines, news, social networking, music downloads, sports, and streaming radio are all popular on both smartphone and tablet devices. More specifically, people are consuming more content that provides health information, online retail, men's magazine content, electronic payment content, gaming information, job listings, general reference, classifieds, auction content, and family entertainment on mobile devices each year.For the news media, content consumption has shifted online with no signs of turning back. Between 2010 and 2011, all news media sources experienced declines in audience and revenue growth except online and cable television. Newspapers, local television, and magazines experienced the biggest declines followed by network television. Audio remained flat.With digital revenues on the rise and a clear shift toward mobile content consumption in progress, Business Insider also took a closer look at mobile apps in its report. Some of the key findings related to mobile apps include:

  • App store downloads should hit 60 billion by mid-2013.
  • Smartphone users spend more time using mobile apps than the mobile web.
  • Mobile is dominated by Android and Apple.
  • Apple dominates app revenue, commerce traffic, and web traffic.

The report's mobile media conclusion reminds us that digital is now a 4-screen world consisting of desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The Business Insider team answers two important questions. First, should your digital media strategy be mobile only? According to the report, that's not a good idea. Second, should you put mobile first in your media plan? According to the Business Insider experts, mobile should be first, "only if you have a totally mobile-centric app or you want to annoy your customers."What do you think?You can follow the link to read the complete The Future of Digital report from Business Insider.Image: Sean MacEntee

Illustration of colorful books on a shelf against a dark background.